Conventional speech recognition systems used for accessing structured data tend to be very restrictive in terms of the signals (e.g., user commands or utterances) that may be input to search a database. That is, if a user issues a verbal request that is not phrased to exactly match a data item in the system's database, the system may produce inaccurate or incomplete results.
One proposed solution to this problem is to include a plurality of potential alternate signals that may be spoken for each item in the database; however, memory constraints make this proposal difficult to feasibly implement.
Thus, there is a need in the art for a method and apparatus for speech recognition using a dynamic vocabulary.